Nokia Siemens Networks announced last week that it had joined with several R&D partners in the MODE-GAP consortium to successfully transmit 57.6 Tbps through commercially deployed multimode fiber. The demonstration used spatial multiplexing over solid-core multimode fiber.

The partners first announced the results of their experiment in a post-deadline paper at the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) in September.

“With this record data rate we can transmit, over a single fiber, double the capacity required for 7 billion people – the world’s population – to be connected over simultaneous phone calls,” said Robert Richter, head of R&D optical networks at Nokia Siemens Networks. “But this is only the beginning. By 2020, we will be able to support 100 times this capacity, which means that a single fiber would have enough capacity to deliver 40 million different TV streams – for example one for every household in Germany – simultaneously.”

The post-deadline paper was one of several presentations the MODE-GAP consortium offered at the show (see “MODE-GAP project makes progress in mode-division multiplexing”). The group, partially funded by the European Union under its seventh framework program, is investigating components, fiber, and digital signal processing concepts for high-data-rate communications, including spatial multiplexing over photonic band gap fibers in the 1.55-and 2-micrometer region.

“Nokia Siemens Networks is our preferred partner in the industry, as the company provides a crucial vision of system requirements and technology roadmaps,” said Prof. David J. Richardson from the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) at Southampton University, another MODE-GAP participant. “It was the system know-how of the Nokia Siemens Networks research team that made the record possible. Our university is very much looking forward to continuing this fruitful cooperation.”

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